I'm one of those guys, I still use a Q10 (OS10 family) as my daily driver. I felt in love with its ux e.g. the hub which acts both as notification center and timeline, full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!) and an app permission system which allowed you choose which one should be granted to the app (again, back in 2013! Android had to wait years before this was implemented)
Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app, and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but what it does it does well.
Hello fellow q10 fan! Small question: if someone were to start a company to maintain q10 and q20 devices, how valuable would that be to you at a monthly subscription rate?
I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.
I held on to my Q10 for a long time. That feeling of being able to type text with one hand because of the physical keyboard was so awesome. Alas, I finally had to drop it when an application I basically couldn't live without stopped supporting BB platform and I needed the latest version of that App.
I use a BB Classic (q20) every day. It's the most responsive, ergonomic phone on the market aside from the q10. I also have the native development kit and the skills to keep that device operating forever, one thing I noticed is the root SSL certificates are no longer updated. I have copied the ones off my Arch system to the SD card and manually install new roots of trust as they are published.
When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.
In the 10-12 years since I last had a Blackberry, no phone that I've had has come close to it in terms of an email device.
Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over WiFi/HD Calls etc).
To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry".
It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall).
And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.
Let’s say it’s January 9th, 2007 and Steve Jobs has just come off stage after the original iPhone announcement. You’re in charge of BlackBerry. What do you do differently?
Go meet customers, your friends, guys in a bar, kids, your parents with a bag full of iPhones the minute you can. Whatever you do, bypass IT teams that love Blackberry and have invested their time in it and like it. Talk to consumers. IT teams and the profits from having people tied to BES etc will blind you.
Make everyone watch a 20 minute video clip on both phones and ask them which was easier to use. Get them to type out XYZ thing that they hear. Give them the phones for a week and bring them back and ask them to type something else out. See how fast they can type on a screen vs keyboard. Think about what will be more useful a big screen or slightly faster typing.
Then go make a iPhone version and Mac/Windows version of Blackberry Messenger. Give it away for free on all platforms. When that's done. Expand BES to control MDM laptops.
Go find a small company that does music well, ideally one in Stockholm. Integrate their product into your phone and cross platform desktop offering. Use the cheap data deals you have for BES for music, it'll be expensive but will capture a young audience and will differentiate quickly from the iPod to iPhone leap many will make. Data plans are still expensive so driving down the cost will be helpful.
Open source the phone code early but keep the services under your control. Find whoever is running the BlackBerry Store and fire them. Then anyone else who was involved with that. Invent a Men-In-Black memory eraser and use it wisely on anyone involved with that. Find out what the cost of the iPhone app store is, undercut it and switch the model so that the first X percent of initial sales go to the developer.
Hire a couple of smart people and build a free online training course and certification to help people build apps. Treat them nicely. Give them free stuff and whatever tooling they need to build stuff. Translate it into many languages. Pick up the phone and get people from all walks of life, including dire poverty in places in Asia and Africa. Ask them what they would look for to make their life easier (hmm payments you say, hmmmm cheaper phones you say, hmmmm use BES as a sort of Free Basics). Build a decent Chinese Keyboard.
Build search into your phone.
Don't join PRISM, don't do some shady stuff in the Middle East and India about encryption.
Build you the stuff that BES can do well. Messaging turning into productivity. Expand cloud hosting. Turn messaging into something more fun and social. Use encryption as a competitive advantage in the long run. Strike a few deals with phone companies for VOIP.
Go tell the world you aren't worried about it and your main concern is Microsoft (they'll balls up mobile eventually anyway) and oh report Steve Jobs for engaging in anticompetitive contact crap for developers.
Try to find a buyer for the company. I'm completely serious.
BlackBerry did try to build a touchscreen phone, the Storm, and it was a disaster. Had less features than the original iPhone, no apps and launched right after the iPhone 3G and the App Store.
Tech-wise they were at least two years behind. The App Store and the iOS API would further widen the gap as it was easy to develop on iPhone (I remember high school kids getting their apps on the store) while blackberry still didn't have a stable and consistent API across it's heavily fragmented lineup.
I said this from the very beginning. Switch to android but skin it and lock it down as tight as possible. Port over BB messenger. Make a killer top of the line android phone with the signature BB physical keyboard.
Placate Verizon with something, but keep going on the keyboard interface, get cheaper, be the best messaging phone, and start hiring some chip designers.
My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the phone world.
My wife has cerebral palsy and needs a hardware keyboard. Therefore we will try to keep BlackBerry phones alive as long as possible. It's a niche market.
I had a blackberry until last year. I love a physical keyboard. I know I'm the minority but I'll never be able to type as well on a screen with no tactile feedback as I can on a physical keyboard.
I don't think anyone prefers the screen keyboard over a real one. I use my phone mainly for consuming information, any typing can wait until I get to a real keyboard. Even when I had a Blackberry, typing was only marginally more tolerable.
It is unbelievably fast getting things done on my BlackBerry Key2 - I can bang off a message or reply to something way faster than on an iPhone or other Android phone. I can touch-type, there are tons of key-based shortcuts, the combined email/messaging/notifications app is the best there is, and yet it's also a touch-screen Android phone.
I picked up a keyone for my personal device after my Nexus 5 bit the dust (it lasted over 5 years), and I'm really happy with it. I had used a few newer android flagship devices as work phones (pixel 3 most recently), but I really hated the huge screen size on everything. I was getting frequent hand cramps on the latest pixel, and one handed usage, even for light browsing was impossible for me (fwiw, I'm a 5'5" woman with hands to match). The smaller screen height of the KeyOne fits my needs perfectly, and having a physical keyboard again is just icing on the cake. Related, this is the first phone where I haven't cracked the screen within the first year (without a case, no less!). I've dropped it a ton on hard surfaces, but it seems that the keyboard cushions the fall, so that was an unexpected benefit.
Also using a KeyOne without a case. After one too many drops on concrete, the frame ended up ever-so-slightly bent out of shape. As per TFA though, everything about the KeyOne is relatively easy to repair when compared to all the other glass-and-glue phones. So far, I've replaced the midframe, keyboard, back cover, and battery, making my phone a mish-mash of the bronze, silver, and black edition.
Strangely enough, my screen has never broken either. It must be something about the keyboard and the nice big bezel.
I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal).
The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.
Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.
That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.
Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.
The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices.
Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.
And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.
The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.
There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
> Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone.
But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support.
And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg).
Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.
I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]!
Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.
All my best phones were blackberry.
From the good old ones up to the Z10. The developer scene at he time of OS10 was so cool!
Fantastic devices, such a shame that people enjoyed seeing blackberry die out.
I'm still using my playbook, 11 years and going strong
I have a playbook - there is so much to like about it, in particular that it runs QNX and with a terminal emulator (I'd have to look up the name) you have a very cool terminal based tablet, even including it's own elVIs VI editor and python 3.5.
The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.
I had a Curve (colour, no 3G), it was amazing having access to email in my pocket.
However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT, and corporate IT is universally shit, I assume my (dinosaur) company had standard policies - which meant massively locked down, you couldn't install any apps, so there was no way an "app store" would have succeeded selling things like angry birds.
This left space for those with power in the organisations to get an iphone, enjoy playing silly games, see the potential of all the other apps, and then order IT to make email work on their phones so they didn't have to carry a blackberry around.
I remember seeing the first touchscreen blackberry (it was named the Storm).
It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use edge making it even more sluggish.
You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered anyways.
Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of specs.
I used to repair cell phones for a living and OMG that device was so bad. I think they came out with a v2 that was only slightly better. Yes the whole screen was also a button.
It broke really easily in addition to being hard to use.
I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a long time I was capped at whichever the last version that supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of updating the app, which somehow worked.
I used to be a blackberry developer, granted it was my first job, but nevertheless: I'm glad blackberry died it's slow, painful death.
Developing for blackberry was a disaster, I can even say it was the single worst programming experience I've been through. To name issues off the top of my head:
- signing code with BB's SLOW servers every time you wanted to deploy to a physical device (I'm talking waiting times of 50+ seconds). These servers regularly keeled (there were websites to tell you if they did), meaning you couldn't deploy to a device to test on, which was important because:
- emulators were so far off the actual devices you needed to deploy to multiple devices regularly to make sure you code worked
- devices would restart regularly, and blackberries took a long time to start
- each device, with the same OS, had different quirks, and different APIs would give different outputs depending on a combination of device/OS-version, which was important when those outputs were for things like screen size.
- the developer tools were just not there: things like getting to logs, etc
- heroics were required to do things like override the default blue highlight in a list selector (i forget the name) in order to get our application's design to work right.
I used to do dual Android/Blackberry development, and I hated projects on BB. I am however talking BB OS 5/6/7. Our company wouldn't even invest in developing natively for BB10, we'd just port android.
As a true lover of the physical keyboard, I tried to love the KeyOne. It was okay; the way the OS handled the screen ratio was a bit wonky, and the camera was pretty lackluster. The device itself was a midranger - it chugged from time to time. Ultimately I sold it because I really wanted a better camera.
As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical keyboard days are done.
In our current era, I think it's too much of a risk to use a mobile email client that isn't capable of IMAP over TLS1.2 (or ideally TLS1.3). And similar for TLS1.2 SMTP submission for outbound.
I wouldn't want to be using a 8 year old Blackberry that only support TLS1.1 to talk to my email server. All of those old crypto schemes have been specifically disabled.
[+] [-] simo_dax|5 years ago|reply
Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app, and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but what it does it does well.
Also, the privacy is unmatched
[+] [-] Jermaine_Jabi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|5 years ago|reply
Only two years behind the N9.
[+] [-] arch-ninja|5 years ago|reply
I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.
[+] [-] jesterson|5 years ago|reply
Had to switch to major OS because of banking and few other apps.
Every single device since then sucked, including BB Android based crap.
The last time I've something like that was when I switched to 9900
[+] [-] NearAP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acct776|5 years ago|reply
Unless nation states or mercs are in your threat model, that is.
[+] [-] arch-ninja|5 years ago|reply
When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.
[+] [-] gertrunde|5 years ago|reply
Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over WiFi/HD Calls etc).
[+] [-] afandian|5 years ago|reply
It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall).
And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.
[+] [-] afandian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|5 years ago|reply
Apple will be too inward to be competition for that.
[+] [-] secfirstmd|5 years ago|reply
Make everyone watch a 20 minute video clip on both phones and ask them which was easier to use. Get them to type out XYZ thing that they hear. Give them the phones for a week and bring them back and ask them to type something else out. See how fast they can type on a screen vs keyboard. Think about what will be more useful a big screen or slightly faster typing.
Then go make a iPhone version and Mac/Windows version of Blackberry Messenger. Give it away for free on all platforms. When that's done. Expand BES to control MDM laptops.
Go find a small company that does music well, ideally one in Stockholm. Integrate their product into your phone and cross platform desktop offering. Use the cheap data deals you have for BES for music, it'll be expensive but will capture a young audience and will differentiate quickly from the iPod to iPhone leap many will make. Data plans are still expensive so driving down the cost will be helpful.
Open source the phone code early but keep the services under your control. Find whoever is running the BlackBerry Store and fire them. Then anyone else who was involved with that. Invent a Men-In-Black memory eraser and use it wisely on anyone involved with that. Find out what the cost of the iPhone app store is, undercut it and switch the model so that the first X percent of initial sales go to the developer.
Hire a couple of smart people and build a free online training course and certification to help people build apps. Treat them nicely. Give them free stuff and whatever tooling they need to build stuff. Translate it into many languages. Pick up the phone and get people from all walks of life, including dire poverty in places in Asia and Africa. Ask them what they would look for to make their life easier (hmm payments you say, hmmmm cheaper phones you say, hmmmm use BES as a sort of Free Basics). Build a decent Chinese Keyboard.
Build search into your phone.
Don't join PRISM, don't do some shady stuff in the Middle East and India about encryption.
Build you the stuff that BES can do well. Messaging turning into productivity. Expand cloud hosting. Turn messaging into something more fun and social. Use encryption as a competitive advantage in the long run. Strike a few deals with phone companies for VOIP.
Go tell the world you aren't worried about it and your main concern is Microsoft (they'll balls up mobile eventually anyway) and oh report Steve Jobs for engaging in anticompetitive contact crap for developers.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|5 years ago|reply
BlackBerry did try to build a touchscreen phone, the Storm, and it was a disaster. Had less features than the original iPhone, no apps and launched right after the iPhone 3G and the App Store.
Tech-wise they were at least two years behind. The App Store and the iOS API would further widen the gap as it was easy to develop on iPhone (I remember high school kids getting their apps on the store) while blackberry still didn't have a stable and consistent API across it's heavily fragmented lineup.
[+] [-] kilroy123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|5 years ago|reply
BBM for messages needs to be up and running.
[+] [-] boomskats|5 years ago|reply
My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the phone world.
[+] [-] _nalply|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmiller123456|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamCritch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudosteph|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29083011397778|5 years ago|reply
Strangely enough, my screen has never broken either. It must be something about the keyboard and the nice big bezel.
[+] [-] blhack|5 years ago|reply
The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.
Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.
That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.
Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.
And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.
The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.
There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|5 years ago|reply
But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support.
And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg).
Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
[+] [-] Fnoord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andmikey|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.
[+] [-] nunodonato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy99|5 years ago|reply
The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.
[+] [-] iso1631|5 years ago|reply
However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT, and corporate IT is universally shit, I assume my (dinosaur) company had standard policies - which meant massively locked down, you couldn't install any apps, so there was no way an "app store" would have succeeded selling things like angry birds.
This left space for those with power in the organisations to get an iphone, enjoy playing silly games, see the potential of all the other apps, and then order IT to make email work on their phones so they didn't have to carry a blackberry around.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|5 years ago|reply
It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use edge making it even more sluggish.
You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered anyways.
Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of specs.
[+] [-] joncrane|5 years ago|reply
It broke really easily in addition to being hard to use.
[+] [-] bengale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewda|5 years ago|reply
I would pay good money for a quality after-market keyboard to snap on to the bottom or side of an iPhone.
[+] [-] speeder|5 years ago|reply
Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.
[+] [-] Rumperuu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamCritch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acct776|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avh02|5 years ago|reply
Developing for blackberry was a disaster, I can even say it was the single worst programming experience I've been through. To name issues off the top of my head:
- signing code with BB's SLOW servers every time you wanted to deploy to a physical device (I'm talking waiting times of 50+ seconds). These servers regularly keeled (there were websites to tell you if they did), meaning you couldn't deploy to a device to test on, which was important because:
- emulators were so far off the actual devices you needed to deploy to multiple devices regularly to make sure you code worked
- devices would restart regularly, and blackberries took a long time to start
- each device, with the same OS, had different quirks, and different APIs would give different outputs depending on a combination of device/OS-version, which was important when those outputs were for things like screen size.
- the developer tools were just not there: things like getting to logs, etc
- heroics were required to do things like override the default blue highlight in a list selector (i forget the name) in order to get our application's design to work right.
I used to do dual Android/Blackberry development, and I hated projects on BB. I am however talking BB OS 5/6/7. Our company wouldn't even invest in developing natively for BB10, we'd just port android.
Good riddance.
[+] [-] zucked|5 years ago|reply
As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical keyboard days are done.
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
I wouldn't want to be using a 8 year old Blackberry that only support TLS1.1 to talk to my email server. All of those old crypto schemes have been specifically disabled.